Don’t worry. I’m not dead…yet. It has been a crazy couple of months since I released the first version of Shadowbox. If you’re wondering what I’ve been up to, here’s a short list:

• Graduated college
• Took a week-long vacation to Hawai’i
• Ate way too many Mauna Loa’s
• Moved
• Started a new job

I’m pretty sure that at least 3 of the above qualify as major life-altering events, so please excuse me for not having released a major update to Shadowbox in the past few months. ;) I’m back now.

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Hello all! It has been quite a while since I’ve posted anything here. I’ve been spending most of my free time improving Shadowbox instead of writing new blog material.

Due to popular demand, the next version of Shadowbox will have much improved i18n support (among other improvements). However, unfortunately I’m only fluent in 1.5 languages (English and some Italian), so I need your help. If you would like Shadowbox translated into your native tongue, please translate the following object and post it here or send it to me.

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Just like almost every other blogger I know, I recently fell victim to the blog redesign bug. I apologize to those of you who have been waiting for new features to be incorporated into Shadowbox, but I just felt like I had to get this off of my mind first. Now that it’s done (with a few small bugs still hanging around in various browsers no doubt) I’ll be getting on with more serious projects.

One major change that I made with the site is in the commenting. Instead of using straight HTML, I switched to using John Gruber’s Markdown format. In fact, pretty much the whole site is based on Markdown now. The posts, comments, and even the comment preview function. By the way, I plan on making the comment preview plugin available on WordPress as soon as I get some time.

If you’re afraid of Markdown, don’t be. It is the most easy-to-use writing tool that I can think of. In fact, I bet you already know most of the rules.

I have a lot of good stuff in the works that I’ll be making publicly available very soon. In the meantime, feel free to let me know what you think of the redesign!

This morning, I released version 1.0 of Shadowbox. In its first month, the beta was downloaded over 15,000 times! I really appreciate the amount of interest the JavaScript community has shown in this project. I’m working hard to make sure that it’s a quality piece of code, and I hope you enjoy it. The 1.0 version includes the following feature enhancements over the previous betas:

• Extensive and fully documented JavaScript API
• Compatibility with the original Lightbox HTML markup
• Support for image maps
• Numerous other options and bug fixes

If you have any questions about how to use Shadowbox for your project, please ask them in the support forum.

More information here.

It’s been difficult to keep the discussion threads organized here on my blog, so I opened up a forum with the nice folks at Nabble. Please post any questions or difficulties that you’re having with Shadowbox in that venue.

You can find it here.